Facebook's sweet sixth birthday

08/02/10 posted by Liz Niland

Facebook celebrated its sixth birthday over the last week with yet another home page redesign, a rumoured foray into webmail and the announcement that they now have 400 million users.

The redesign of the home page was no big surprise to anyone (partially due to information released last year, and partially due to the frequency with which the home page is redesigned) but the notching of the big 400 did impress us a little; especially since the COO of the social networking giant reported that they had only just broken the 350 million a month or so ago. So while Twitter’s growth appears to be reaching a plateau, the number of Facebook users is still increasing.

Given Aussies in particular are heading to their social portals first (before search engines) when surfing the interwebs, it’s a clever move by Facebook to promote the visibility of search functionality (and a clever move by Bing to get in on it). It’s also nice to see a return to a left navigational menu and a slightly more streamlined integration of the Facebook chat feature.

While these changes might simply be part of creating a more user-friendly experience, they might also be further substance to the rumour that Facebook is creating a webmail product - code-named Project Titan - to replace its internal private messaging.

TechCrunch are reporting word from an unnamed source that the “Gmail killer” will have full POP/IMAP support and give users an email address based on their vanity url (That’s the bit after the “.com” in the url of your profile page).

We doubt that a Facebook mail product will take the world by storm, but, for casual onliners and young first account users, it could certainly provide an integrated email solution.